Martin Olson

Martin Olson is an American comedy writer/TV producer, bestselling author and composer. He is known for his unusual subject matter, and is an original member of the Boston Comedy Scene. He is the adoptive father of actress Olivia Olson.

Olson has received five Emmy nominations, three for television writing and two for song writing. Olson also received an Ace Award for television writing.[citation needed]

Olson began writing for comedians before there were any comedy clubs in Boston. As a young man, he sent batches of jokes to Rodney Dangerfield, which were always returned with the same polite note scrawled at the bottom, "Sorry, Marty!" (According to his agent's press kit, years later when writing for Penn & Teller in Las Vegas, Olson produced comedy bits with Dangerfield and the two became friends.)[citation needed]

Olson first sold comedy material to the hosts of local "Gong Shows", which began his career as a comedy writer.

Olson and comedian Lenny Clarke became roommates in an apartment near Harvard Square where comedians from all over the country stayed while performing in their comedy club. Olson wrote for Clarke, who soon became the most popular comedian in Boston. Their apartment became known as The Barracks, a legendary hub of comedy and depravity that was the subject of a television special on Boston comedy in the 1980s, and also of the award-winning documentary on the Boston comedy scene When Standup Stood Out (2006) directed by filmmaker-comedian Fran Solomita.

Olson was the piano player for the second comedy club in the Boston area, the Ding Ho. He began showing short films he wrote and directed. This led to Olson writing Lenny Clarke's Late Show, a late-night comedy TV series on TV-38 hosted and co-written by Lenny Clarke. This bizarre, two-hour weekly show attracted a small but dedicated cult following. After two years, however, Olson and Clarke were fired for airing two controversial segments ("News for Negroes" and "The Mentally Retarded Faith Healer" featuring Bobcat Goldthwait).

Olson took his tapes from the show and drove cross-country to San Francisco with comedian Don Gavin. There, by coincidence, the 1980 San Francisco Comedy Competition was starting up, which offered a first prize of $10,000. Olson helped Gavin audition and make it into the finals. There Olson met his future wife Kay Furtado, a writer who had been flown to San Francisco to coach another comedian in the competition. A year later they married in a ceremony in San Francisco by comedian Michael Pritchard, attended by all of the local comedians. Olson and his wife moved to Los Angeles where they raised two children, Casey Olson and Olivia Olson.

Olson wrote, co-wrote or directed a number of off-beat stage plays in Los Angeles, including "The Head", "The Idiots", "I Never Knew My Father", "1958", "Torn", "The Ron Lynch Show", "The Bob Rubin Experience" and "Cold Black Heart" at various theaters, including the Comedy Central Stage, the HBO Theater and the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood.

He wrote the satirical book Encyclopaedia of Hell, and sold the film rights to Warner Bros. through Mad Chance Productions.[citation needed] With Ken Kaufman and Howard Klausner, Olson co-wrote the final draft of the screenplay adaptation of his book for WB under a new title, D-Men.

Olson first collaborated with song-writer Jeff Root on four home studio albums in the 1970s. Their independent lo-fi album Idiot's Delight (1975) was praised by Beatles producer George Martin as "the best songs on a home-recorded disc I have ever heard."[4]

Olson's latest CD was written and recorded with his daughter Olivia Olson (July 2013) and called The Father-Daughter Album of Unspeakable Beauty, released at Comicon SD 2013. Their new album, Still Evil, has a release date Oct 9 at Comicon NYC 2016.

Olson's encyclopedic satire Encyclopedia of Hell is published by Feral House (July 2011);[5] the film rights were bought by Warner Bros. through producer Andrew Lazar for Mad Chance. The French edition was published in 2016 by Les Editions Lapin, Paris. His notorious children's book The Adventure Time Encyclopaedia (July 2013), published by Abrams Books, reached #5 on the New York Times Best-Seller List. His latest Abrams book, The Enchiridion/Marcy's Super-Secret Scrapbook, was cowritten with his daughter Olivia, and released at Comicon NYC 2015. Olson also wrote two collections of poems, Hitler's Dog and Imaginary History of Reality.